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Wednesday, 12 February 2014

Buddha Day: Lucky Buddha in Bangkok, Thailand

Wearing shorts for the first time! So excited!! I felt like a bit of a sloot wearing them at first, I was so used to covering up while in Egypt.

Well, it's more like evening here in Bangkok, but whatevs.

I had an awesome day today - after changing rooms to what will hopefully be a less noisy one (fingers crossed!) I head out to walk around Bangkok and see some of the sights. I wanted to walk past the Grand Palace, but got brutally lost. I ended up seeing some random temples along the way, but I couldn't quite figure out which ones they were.

I also walked through a couple of beautiful parks - so nice to see so much lush greenery in the middle of the city!

I ended up walking down a random street and met a tuktuk driver who was holding a map with a picture of the floating market. He told me it was my lucky day - 'it's Buddha day!'

Mai koh jai. No comprendo.

'The lucky Buddha is open!'

I see.

So, instead of walking around like I had planned, I ended up going on a bit of a tuktuk joy ride for 20 baht ($1 = 30 baht)

Lucky Buddha

The first sight on the list was the Lucky Buddha. My tuktuk driver dropped me off and insisted I take as long as I wanted to. 'Tuktuk stay here!' Perfect.

I wandered into the temple area and had no idea where to go since all of the signs were in Thai.

A man was walking along and spoke English, and told me to follow him. He asked me if I was Buddhist and I said no, but I meditate :)

He brought me into one of the temples and showed me his family's statue where he comes to pray whenever the temple is open (I guess it's not open every day...for some reason unbeknownst to me).

There was a huge golden stupa in the middle, so beautiful!

I then went around to a temple at the back (with a bit more help from some of the monks) and saw the Lucky Buddha with its shrine.

A lovely lady insisted on giving me a pamphlet and kept talking to me in Thai and pointing at my smile, smiling widely herself. Gotta love sign language when you are in a foreign country ;)

Thai Suit Factory

Next on our list was a couple of Thai suit factories. Bangkok is well known for its specialty tailoring, and you can get suits made for very cheap.

From my understanding, if I went in to look, the driver got a free gas card. So I helped a brotha out and went in to look and then high-tailed out of there when they started to make a move on me with a measuring tape. Don't need a suit right now, thanks!